Peter Handke’s play “Offending the Audience” (1966) challenges the notion of theatre as a space of pretense and representation, breaking down its mechanisms. Time inside the venue and outside it is one and the same. The dancers are simply the bodies they are, and the audience is an active and present partner in crime.

The use of the play deprives the viewers of the suspension of disbelief they crave. The audience becomes a body aware of its physicality, of being an active viewer, of its debasement, singularity, mental flexibility, and ability to undermine world orders.

The spoken, sung, written, and danced text spreads across the stage and comes together to form a concoction of beauty and pain. And when the rhetoric of “us” and “you” collapses, an endless stream of insults is hurled at the crowded hall.

Welcome, you pretentious lowlifes, motherland’s sycophants. You will be moving soon. Get ready.